


and living grimly

by orphan_account



Category: Mukuro Naru Hoshi Tama Taru Ko | Shadow Star
Genre: Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:41:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shiina, Mamiko, and scenes from the pains of apotheosis. (post-ending fic; spoilery as hell, accordingly.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	and living grimly

It has been five days since the death of humanity, and Shiina does not know what to do.

The sun seems to rise slower, now, and the rain falls harder; the sky is always bright, she thinks. She tries not to look up into it too often. She finds it far too clear. Mamiko never understands that—not Mamiko with her flat-lined mouth and her endlessly rhythmic breathing, something like a machine learning to replicate a human, never quite flawed enough. Mamiko is full of questions like "is this not what you wanted?" and "would you like to try again?" and they are all so horribly empty in a way Shiina cannot make sense of; there is simply nothing to them, here or anywhere. She supposes that finding emotion in Mamiko's words at all is a little like trying to draw blood from a stone, or life from a single old bone.

Shiina wonders once if, should things ever turn truly sour, she could kill Mamiko. The thought runs a handful of laps around her mind before she, quietly, quickly, hobbles it: even now she has no idea exactly how much her and Mamiko share. They are the only two people left—not necessarily the last, but, as it stands, the only—and there is no point in risking their relationship when it is all that remains. She tries to imagine Mamiko's response to catching a glimpse of that thought: "am I not who you would have wanted with you here?", perhaps, or maybe even "are you not yet alone enough?"

Beneath her feet, she could swear the ground trembles. She realises with a feeling something like a dull strike to the skull that she could fill the sky up with clouds, if she pleased—make the sun rise swifter and the rainfall come softer. She could coax the waves closer to her without a single step. She could talk the stars into going out.

She does not know what to do, and it hurts terribly.

* * *

"Are you lonely?" Mamiko says, two weeks in and two hours after Shiina first goes down to the shore to look for fish. She has moved very little in that time: perhaps not at all but for kicking her feet in the water every now and again to feel bubbles surge between her toes. From the surface, the sun glares at her. Everything feels wrong—it's one of those days.

She squints down at the line where sand ebbs into sea, gold into a greenish-blue. "Kuri," she says, face creased in a frown, "did we kill everything or just everyone?"

"What a strange question," Mamiko replies, too measured to bear; Shiina turns towards her and sees now she is looking up at the sky like something so trivial and worldly as light couldn't stand a chance of bothering her. Shiina imagines Mamiko could see perfectly with no eyes at all. "What, to you, is the difference?"

Shiina sniffs in the sea-breeze. "Stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Stop being so—so you," Shiina says, a little desperate, looking away once more. "Nevermind. Forget I said anything."

There is a long moment of silence before Mamiko sits down beside her—not quite close enough to see, but enough to know. Mamiko smells faintly of smoke and ash and black pepper and Shiina's stomach stirs and twists at a sudden muscle-memory of roasting fish. She hasn't been hungry at all, since finding Sheol. She wishes she would be.

"Well," Mamiko says, half a murmur and half a sigh. "That would be up to you, Shiina."

Shiina closes her eyes and pictures: the world as one big rock-pool and her drifting towards the bottom of it, sinking like her innards are packed full of salt and minerals, beautifully weighed down. " _Sh_ iina," Mamiko says, faster, firmer, grounded; there's a rush and a push and the surface cracks like soft-ice to let Shiina through, air filling her thick and fast up like a seashell in a storm.

When she opens her eyes, the shore-line begins at her knees, and there are little splashes of orange darting wild and bright around her feet.

"Oh," she says, after a moment, swinging her head round to see Mamiko looking down with dark, curious eyes. "I—did I—"

"They won't survive, there," Mamiko says, like it is the most natural response in the world, and then does something very strange: she smiles, closed-mouth and slight but impossible to miss. Shiina cannot look away. Her chest feels startlingly tight. "But it's a start."

_A start to what_? Shiina thinks, and watches Mamiko's face soften in some inexplicable way at the sight of a handful of goldfish struggling through saltwater; _a start to the end of an end_ comes back, unexpected to the point of making her heartbeat skip a step, and then nothing more. 

(It hangs in Shiina's head for a long time afterwards, intrusive in some awfully intimate way, like a foreign imprint on the mattress of her bed, and she wonders if that could almost be what they are now—just two strangers beneath the sheets together at the end of the night, hoping for something to wake up to.)

* * *

"—if I can make some—some stupid fish out of nothing without even _trying_ to, then why the hell can't I bring anyone back?" It has been a long day leading into a longer night still, and Shiina's voice echoes now, forever and ever, right up into the stars; she hopes if they can hear that it unsettles them horribly. She hopes she could crack the sky to pieces with one single endless scream and every bit of it would come crashing down upon her and Mamiko together, the end of the end of the end. She hopes—she hopes—

"Why can't I bring them _back_ ," she says, with no hope at all, and cradles half-a-person to her chest: closer and closer and tighter and tighter, til skin begins to strain and flesh begins to crumble, til all she has left is bone and bloodstains and dark dark hair and the entire earth to be a grave for it.

Mamiko looks at her with what could be wariness, or perhaps disdain—maybe pity, at a stretch. "You have no control over the soul, Shiina; you can only give one body. Never the other way around."

Shiina watches the dirt devour the remains of a girl who, for one foolish moment, had nearly been Akira Sakura, and tries to understand, tries and tries and fails.

* * *

(She spends three days straight entirely withdrawn, after that—lying dormant in the ruins of some old building that could have been her home, or the hospital that claimed Akira for so long, or the school that broke Hiroko's heart. It could've been anything, anywhere.

Mamiko sends her strange little fragments of thoughts to wake up to, here and there: _look after yourself_ ; _give yourself whatever you need_ ; _we have no shortage of time_. Shiina turns them over and over in her head, struggling to read their sincerity.

Her head hurts like hell. She feels something like a cockroach in a left-behind home, with the sentience to feel the dust but not the sapience to fathom its being there, making family and feeding on remains and some day carving a deathbed out of life it cannot even see—she feels, in the end, very small.

If nothing else, she at least has blissfully peaceful dreams: dreams of birds and plants and hot-baths and takeout for dinner, paper cranes that flutter at her touch and long winding bike-rides to nowhere, trying to touch the skyline.)

* * *

It has been just over one month, maybe, probably, and Shiina is growing sunflowers. 

They're good for nectar, Mamiko tells her; they could bring about some bees, if Shiina remembers what they look like, make another tiny step back towards a full and functioning ecosystem. It's always strange little disjointed things like this, things that make sense to some part of her deep down inside, even if they don't quite to the superficial self that makes up the surface—the self of old-days that she wears now like a skin, like a shell. The borders blur sometimes but she knows there are pieces of her here that came in from the outside. 

She thinks about the taste of honey and the smell of pollen, and wonders if Mamiko is familiar with either. "Not particularly," Mamiko answers aloud; Shiina's hand stumbles in the midst of brushing up dirt from around a row of stems. It always takes her by surprise when Mamiko does that—she's gotten more used to having thoughts stray between one another's heads, just a little, but it never stops seeming odd to openly acknowledge it as it happens. It feels as though it ought to be a secret, for some reason, a secret with no-one to tell. She supposes she is still in the process of relearning how to be anything other than hidden.

Shiina takes in the spring air, crisp and cool, feeling it scrub hints of tension out of her muscles, and looks up at the sky with a little tremble in her lashes: it's a fine day, as they go. She hasn't cried since morning, hasn't screamed since the evening before; her throat feels clear and her breath is steady. "What _are_ you, Kuri?"

"I cannot answer that."

Shiina scrunches up her nose. "You can't or just won't?"

"I can't, because I myself do not know."

"Then I guess there's no point in sticking to this line of conversation," Shiina says, and then sighs, hard. "I—God, I never know what to say to you."

Mamiko is quiet for a long minute after that; she seems deep in thought but Shiina fails to sense anything. It's possible Mamiko has simply found some way to put up walls where she cannot, even if it frustrates her immeasurably to think so. She wonders when it will rain next.

"I know, at least," Mamiko says, out of the blue, "that I am here with you, and I am, for that matter, quite glad that of all people—it should be with you." The hem of her dress folds around her shins in the breeze and her hair frames her face a little off-center: she looks bright, free. She looks _real_ , Shiina thinks, astoundingly so. "I want to do anything I can for you, Shiina."

"Tell me what to do," Shiina replies before she can catch herself, sharp and honest and wanting, and immediately knows it is too late to stop. "Please tell me what to do because I have no idea."

From several feet away, Mamiko touches Shiina's hand. The grass and weeds and earth beneath her gather, clumping together into points, firm as stone but gentle as sand coming up through the gaps between her fingers; it's the absolute strangest thing. Shiina can feel dew following the creases in her palm and it hits her, fast and strong, that it could be like Sheol has been crying for her so she does not have to, today. It could be a kinder world, a better world—it has to be.

"For now," Mamiko says, and sits down beside Shiina, hand still in hand, in a sense, "I suppose we could wait." Shiina swallows down a knot of nervous energy and, slowly, runs a finger over the delicate curve of a sunflower's petals: watching them stretch outwards as she does, turning their faces up towards the sky, nanometre by nanometre, transfixed.

"Alright," she says, a little breathless, perhaps almost a little hopeful, and, together, they do.


End file.
